On March 1, I guest-hosted my friend Buck Sexton’s “The Buck Sexton Show.” During the episode, we discussed the Michael Cohen hearings, the Kabuki Congress and its efforts to at very worst in the eyes of The Resistance inflict punishment through the process of endless investigation, the Democratic Civil War and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chilling blacklist, the unwinnable 2020 Democratic field and the challenge of winning progressives and moderates, why the Left must resort to Science to justify socialism, the latest on the China and North Korea negotiations with former Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, Steve Yates, and the future of conservatism and the defense of Tucker Carlson’s manifesto with Claremont Institute Vice President for Education and American Mind editor Dr. Matthew Peterson.

On February 15, I guest-hosted my friend Buck Sexton’s “The Buck Sexton Show.” During the episode, we discussed President Trump’s national emergency declaration to supplement border wall funding and both the political and legal arguments surrounding it with former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel and current Berkeley Law professor John Yoo, the controversy surrounding the census citizenship question with former Department of Justice Civil Rights Division attorney and current President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) J. Christian Adams as well as the rising popularity of socialism and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in America.

My Guest

Rich Higgins is an expert on the nexus between theological doctrines and information age unconventional warfare, and has spent 20 years combating terrorism in a variety of senior positions within the Department of Defenses.

Higgins, an early supporter of President Trump, served as director for strategic planning in President Trump’s National Security Council (NSC).

That all changed when a memo that he had produced for President Trump on the political warfare that he was to face internally from the Deep State, and externally from the media and like-minded interest groups in collusion with the administrative state, leaked out to the public.

For Encounter Books’ “Close Encounters” video interview series, I spoke with the eminent Hoover Institution classicist, historian and National Review Online contributor Victor Davis Hanson on a wide range of subjects from the decline of the American academy to Middle East policy, North Korea, the Mueller special counsel and the assault on the Trump presidency from all sides and much more.

In Part II of my in-depth interview with Andy, we discussed Russiagate, the pervasive unethical and at times lawless behavior of law enforcement and the intelligence community with respect to Donald Trump and Russia versus Hillary Clinton and her e-mail server, the apparently limitless mandate of Robert Mueller’s special counsel, obstruction of justice and much more.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, has inadvertently revealed the ultimate subtext for the political establishment’s antagonism towards President Trump.

He writes in a recent New York Times editorial:

When asked for counsel these days by officers who are already in government, especially more junior ones, I remind them of their duty to help the president succeed. But then I add: ‘Protect yourself. Take notes and save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs it. [Emphasis mine]

The focus of his piece is that we are moving into a new “post-truth era,” making it impossible for intelligence agencies to do their job.

But as I show in a new piece at The Federalist, this premise masks the true animating factor behind the words and deeds of the national security and foreign policy establishment in relation to President Trump from the 2016 campaign on.

The establishment has served under presidents before who have not been, to put it politely, paragons of truth and virtue — sometimes to the great detriment of our national security.

What really differentiates the current president from his predecessors is his willingness to speak one major inconvenient truth: The world has gotten progressively more dangerous and chaotic under establishment leadership in the post-Cold War era, in particular under the Obama-Clinton administration.

Calling out this failure, and challenging the worldview that has led to the actions that caused it, is what these individuals cannot abide because it represents an attack on their power, influence and credibility.

“[A]bove all, protect[ing the institution” is a sentiment that would suggest those in our bureaucracies would condone all manner of actions that undermine our constitutional order.

And what have we seen over the last two years in the national security and foreign policy establishment, as well as our justice system?

Former Obama attorney general Eric Holder has now joined 17 state attorneys general in expressing his outrage over the potential reinstatement of this citizenship question in the census by way of a characteristically deceptive and hyperbolic column penned for popular consumption in The New Republic.

I systematically debunk Holder’s arguments in a new piece at The Federalist.

You can find my related twitter thread beginning below:

Is it a bigger threat to republican govt when Americans are hypothetically better represented, or when noncitizens in actuality dilute their representation? Dems led by Eric Holder and 17 Resistance state AGs want to prioritize noncitizens over you. https://t.co/B8un91xNTA THREAD

Do Americans have a right to know who is living among them? The Trump Department of Justice says yes, but Democrats are revolting when it comes to the reinstatement of a simple question on citizenship in the upcoming 2020 U.S. Census.

For The Federalist I explore the emerging controversy over this issue, which is critical because population count (including noncitizens) impacts (i) the apportionment of seats in the U.S. house, (ii) the relative power of each state in the electoral college, (iii) the allocation of billions of dollars in federal funds and (iv) the drawing of potentially every political district in the country.

I also touch on the broader lack of transparency on citizenship in government data, and why it is in the political class’s interest to shield the truth from Americans — truth that hurts its narrative and threatens its agenda.

Trump DOJ wants to reinstate a basic question on citizenship in the census. In their immigration intransigence, Left is revolting. THREAD on the emerging controversy over a potential change affecting $bns of tax dollars and every leg district in America https://t.co/5bEDxJcwx4

Amazingly, therein we find the below nugget on the Justice Department’s subsidizing of Catalist in connection with its failed litigation efforts over North Carolina’s election rules:

The Justice Department also pumped untold thousands of dollars into a database run by a company called Catalist. This database has been populated with data provided by the Democratic National Committee, unions, and other liberal organizations and is used to help them win elections. Catalist’s infrastructure and database are expensive to maintain, but fear not, the Justice Department, in the North Carolina trial and elsewhere, has provided federal tax dollars to its expert witnesses so that they could purchase Catalist’s proprietary data. Yes, federal dollars were used to fund a database that will be used next year to try to win the 2016 election for Democratic candidates.

What’s more:

For all the resources expended, the Justice Department’s entire case was built on speculative claims. Not able to produce a single eligible voter who was or would be unable to vote, the plaintiffs relied on hypothetical statistical arguments to claim that the turnout of black voters would be “suppressed” because they might use early voting and same-day registration slightly more than white voters, and because black voters are “less sophisticated voters.” DOJ experts actually made the borderline-racist argument that “it’s less likely to imagine” that black voters could “figure out or would avail themselves of other forms of registering and voting.” That’s a shameful way to enforce a law that was used to protect real victims of real discrimination in the Deep South.

Its sponsors are engaging in intentional obfuscation (e.g., saying “violent extremism” is the enemy), as well as peddling ineffective and ill-considered policy proposals (more community “empowerment”). The conference will effectively aid and abet America’s increasingly ascendant jihadist foes.

1. Contrary to its big government ethos, the Obama administration asserts that national security should be driven by the people, not the state.

(Image source: BuzzFeed)

According to the White House preview [emphasis mine]:

Really at the core of our approach is that the government does not have all the answers in combatting violent extremism. It is, at its core, a bottom-up approach. It puts communities with civic leaders, with religious authorities, with community power brokers, teachers, health providers, et cetera, in the driver’s seat. They know their citizens best. They are the first line of defense to prevent or counter radicalizing forces that can ultimately lead to violence. And so our approach is to really embrace and empower what local communities can do. So we’ve been working with our federal partners and our local partners to put in place this approach over the past couple of years.

Further:

Again, this is not about government, especially the federal government. The federal government doesn’t have all the answers. This is about building a comprehensive network to fight back against violent extremism. And we are explicitly recognizing the role that civil society plays, the private sector plays, and that families, et cetera, can play in countering violent extremism.

Who knew the Obama administration had so much respect for and faith in civil society?

Yet of course, this faith turns out to be dangerously misplaced as…

2. The groups the president wants to empower are those who may pose the biggest threat.

In December 2011, the White House issued the “Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” – the local partners, of course, being Islamic organizations, including those cited by the Justice Department as working to aid foreign terrorist organizations. All national security and law enforcement agencies on the federal, state and local level would now have to consult these groups and rely on “local partners” as a matter of policy. And as made clear in Salam al-Marayati’s Los Angeles Times op-ed, Islamic groups complaining about counter-terrorism policies or training would disrupt government efforts to “counter violent extremism” gave them an implicit veto over counter-terrorism policies. [Los Angels Times link added for context]

Why should we care about this 2011 report?

A senior Obama administration official noted in previewing the summit that the report details the very efforts the administration will be hawking during the three-day event.

Local partners such as the Council on American-Islam Relations — an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest Hamas funding trial in history — has advised members of the Muslim community not to work with the FBI, and religious leaders to lawyer up as opposed to working together with law enforcement when it comes to potential jihadists. On the eve of the summit, CAIR is reportedly calling for the Department of Justice to “protect those who act in good faith to prevent violent extremism by engaging with [Muslims] considering it in order to dissuade them.”

A partner of perhaps higher standing is the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), a group linked to numerous jihadis and jihadi-sympathizers, that is reportedly the primary liaison between the Muslim community and law enforcement in countering violent extremism. The Boston program will be one of the three held up as a success story during the summit, despite the ISB’s Islamic supremacist efforts.

Looking to the heart of Muslim communities, according to the Mapping Sharia project, imams in over 80 percent of 100 randomly surveyed representative mosques in America recommended the study of violence-positive texts. The correlations with these texts are disturbing, as illustrated below:

In Pew’s extensive 2011 report on Muslims in America, 21 percent of those polled indicated there was a great deal or fair amount of “support for extremism among Muslim American;” 19 percent did not indicate that “suicide bombing/other violence against civilians is justified to defend Islam from its enemies;” only 70 percent indicated that they viewed Al Qaeda “very unfavorably.”

As leaked Department of Homeland Security documents reveal, the second highest concentration of people designated as “known or suspected terrorists” by our government reside in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn’s population is 96,000, and it has the highest percentage of Arab-Americans of any city in the country.

In light of these figures, and the fact that jihadist groups worldwide claim they are at war with America, having committed over 25,000 attacks in the name of Allah since Sept. 11, 2011, one must ask, what exactly is the rationale behind leaving self-policing to Muslim communities when these are the very places from whence jihadists spring?

Such a policy of course is only baffling if you are of the belief that jihad is an Islamic tenet, and that Islamic supremacist ideology is what animates the vast majority of the world’s “violent extremists.”

But of course…

3. According to the administration there is no profile of a “violent extremist.”